"Access to Justice in the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive: Symposium event report", 12 September 2025

...On 7-8 April 2025, the Danish Institute for Human Rights, the German Institute for Human Rights, the French Commission nationale consultative des droits de l’Homme and the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights co-organised a Symposium on the access to justice mechanisms of the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), which are civil liability, administrative supervision by Supervisory Authorities and the company grievance mechanisms. 

The event convened around 60 participants, including country experts on civil liability and access to justice from 17 jurisdictions across the EU, representatives from 13 National Human Rights Institutions, and international experts on business and human rights and access to justice. The aims of the Symposium were to:

• ventilate challenges and opportunities for the CSDDD to play a meaningful role in facilitating access to justice;
• identify attention points for transposition and implementation; and
• identify gaps in access to justice which will not be addressed by the CSDDD which will require further reform or other action.

In this report, we capture the main elements of the discussions to locate the CSDDD’s access to justice mechanisms in the broader remedy ecosystem, distil some key findings to inform the transposition of the CSDDD, and provide recommendations for the implementation of the directive to ensure an effective access to justice for rightsholders who may be impacted by companies’ activities across their global value chains. The report also contains reflections from the discussion concerning how the proposed changes in the Omnibus I will impact the ability of the instrument to provide access to effective remedy.